An expert fuzzy controller for vehicle lateral control

Vehicle lateral control is a challenging problem in areas of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) and automatic control for autonomous vehicles. Most of solutions for lateral control proposed, such as FID, simple fuzzy logic control and Hinfinity, are proved accurate and effective only in simple driving task, such as lane changing, lane following and small curvature crossing turning action. For big curvature crossing turning action, the solutions mentioned above haven't dealt with. In this paper, we propose an expert fuzzy controller, which is based on a 2 Degree of Freedom (2DOF) vehicle lateral dynamic model, to solve the problem both in simple driving task and big curvature crossing turning action. The traditional 2DOF analytic model is used in lane changing, lane following and small curvature crossing turning actions, while an experimental model is used in big curvature crossing turning. That is because the traditional 2DOF analytic model is set up based on the hypothesis that the steering angle of front wheel is small. The experimental model is proved accurate and effective in the realistic driving experiments. In addition, it is proved that the expert fuzzy controller is effective to solve the lateral control problem in complicated driving tasks, such as lane changing, lane following, small and big curvature crossing turning actions, in both simulations and experiments.